George Orwell's Barcelona

George Orwell? “Of course I’ve heard of him,” said Jose Luis Izuel, and reeled off the titles of some of Orwell’s early, lesser-known works: “Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, the one about Burma.” Izuel runs one of the bric-a-brac stalls that are set up every Thursday in front of La Seu cathedral in Barcelona. Among the old soda siphon bottles and shoe lasts I had just found copies of La Vanguardia newspaper from 1936 and 1937, full of smudgy photographs of bombings and trench warfare in the Spanish civil war.

Orwell may well have seen the very same newspapers, as he was in Barcelona at this time, fighting on the Republican side in the war. “And Homage to Catalonia of course,” added Izuel, referring to Orwell’s account of that turbulent time and the part he played in it.

Next Thursday, April 25, marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Homage to Catalonia, which struck me as an excuse not just to reread it but to visit the city that comes alive in its pages. It is lauded as one of the great books on the reality of warfare, and the particular awfulness of fellow countrymen killing each other.

It is also a remarkable portrait of Barcelona at a crucial moment in its history. Yet this topographical aspect has been neglected. Few visitors view Barcelona through Orwell’s pages, despite his having made it easy for us, and the modern tourist city largely ignores the terrible and momentous things that happened here less than a lifetime ago.

The most visible legacy of the war is tucked away in one of the city’s quietest squares, the Plaça Sant Felip Neri near La Seu. In January 1938, the square and its church were hit by a bomb dropped by Mussolini’s air force; 42 people were killed, many of them children. The wall of the church is heavily pocked with shrapnel damage; someone has scrawled: “Always remember the victims of Fascist regimes.”

As for Orwell, the only reference is a small square named after him, which in any case is known locally by another name, “Plaça del Tripi”, or “Acid Square”: the Plaça de George Orwell, complete with Big Brother-ish surveillance cameras, is where Barcelona’s youth kick back on illicit substances.

There’s one obvious reason for the apparent amnesia when it comes to the civil war. The conflict — and the long aftermath of Franco’s dictatorship — left scars that few Spanish care to scratch. “This is a country built upon 40 years of silence,” said Pau Rubio, a Barcelona journalist who is researching his grandfather’s and great-uncle’s experiences in the civil war. Jose Izuel, the market stall holder, was unusual in knowing so much about el escritor inglés. Many of Rubio’s friends haven’t even heard of him.

Pau Rubio and I met in Café Zurich in Plaça Catalunya, brought together by an English teacher and historian, Alan Warren, who lives in the city. Warren offers guided tours of revolutionary Barcelona, as seen through Homage to Catalonia. “It’s all here but nobody knows about it,” he said. “It’s a bit of Barcelona people don’t usually come by.” So precise and limpid is Orwell’s prose that his descriptions of Barcelona read in part like stage directions: nearly all the places he mentions still exist, and you can work out exactly what happened where and when. Most of the action takes place in and around the artery of Las Ramblas, covering an area scarcely bigger than a cricket pitch.

Orwell arrived in Barcelona in December 1936 to find a city in the grip of idealistic fervour, with red and black Anarchist flags fluttering everywhere and loudspeakers on Las Ramblas “bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night”. He signed up with a militia of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) and served on the Aragon front before returning to Barcelona on leave in late April 1937.

“When he came back the revolution had fizzled out,” said Warren as we strode from the Café Zurich into the maelstrom of humanity on Las Ramblas. Beneath leafless plane trees and a winter-blue sky, human statues were setting up their pitches and tourists strolled.

Back in 1937, things had changed utterly in a short time. “The smart restaurants and hotels were full of rich people wolfing expensive meals,” wrote Orwell, who could as easily have been describing now rather than then. He also noted a “horrible feeling of political rivalry and hatred”.

This experience of infighting and misinformation would later feed into some of his greatest works. “From it came Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm,” said Warren. “He had seminal experiences here.” Orwell and his wife, Eileen, checked into the Hotel Continental — still there, on the left at number 138, as you walk down. On May 3 he was crossing the hotel lobby (now a Desigual clothes shop) when a friend casually mentioned “some kind of trouble at the telephone exchange” (also still there) in Plaça Catalunya.

The various Leftist factions that had come together to fight Franco and Fascism were splitting apart. Barcelona was about to tip into violent insanity, and Orwell was at the centre to record what happened.

After his encounter in the hotel he walked down Las Ramblas and had almost reached the Liceu opera house when shooting started. Youths in Anarchist colours were firing at a gunman in “a tall octagonal tower”. Warren positioned us in a side street, the Carrer de Sant Pau, where Orwell must have stood.

Across Las Ramblas was the octagonal tower of the church of Santa Maria del Pi. “And there’s the Metro station,” said Warren, referring to the entrance in the middle of Las Ramblas into which Orwell says the crowd was surging to take cover as the bullets flew.

Orwell hurried on down Las Ramblas to the Hotel Falcon, which was being used by POUM militiamen on leave and is now a library named after the leader of the POUM, Andreu Nin (the building has a pink façade and stands behind the statue to Frederic Soler). Finding a crowd “seething in the entrance-hall” of the hotel, he immediately crossed Las Ramblas to the building opposite, an old “cabaret-theatre” (the Teatro Principal) that served as the “Comité Local” of the POUM.

The Teatro Principal is still there, and still has the ramshackle air that Orwell described. Warren marched us boldly up an ornate marble staircase into one of the theatres, the decorative mouldings of its dome discoloured by age and neglect, a vast censer-like chandelier hanging beneath it, and beneath that a handful of green baize tables, for it is now a snooker club.

“He said he went around getting lost here,” said Warren. “Such a rambling place. He ripped up a curtain to use as a blanket and was afraid one of the crude bombs he carried would go off as he slept.”

At one point Orwell popped back to the Hotel Continental, calling in at the “food-market” — the Boqueria — on the way. Nowadays each stall is a still-life of burnished produce, but all Orwell managed to procure was “a wedge of goat’s-milk cheese”, which he said he was glad of a few days later.

As Barcelona descended into “evil days of street warfare”, Orwell was ordered to defend the “POUM Executive Building”, now the Hotel Rivoli Rambla at number 128 Ramblas. Next door in the Café Moka — still there but “brutally modernised”, said Warren — 20 or 30 Assault Guards were poised to attack, so Orwell positioned himself on the roof of the building opposite, a “cinematograph” called the Poliorama, to keep an eye on them. Look up and you will see the rooftop observatory and the twin domes he describes. For three days and nights he stayed up there amid “a tropical rainstorm” of shooting, reading a succession of Penguin Library books to pass the time.

“What the devil was happening, who was fighting whom and who was winning, was at first very difficult to discover,” he wrote.

Orwell survived the street fighting of May 1937 and returned to the front, where he was shot in the throat (his description is memorable). Recuperating back in Barcelona, he became a fugitive when the POUM was declared an illegal organisation. In late June 1937 he and Eileen managed to escape to France, and from there to the “deep, deep sleep of England” where he wasted no time in writing one of the 20th century’s great books about war.

“They say if you understand the Spanish civil war, you don’t understand it,” Warren told me wryly. Gazing up at the roof of the Poliorama, we imagined Orwell still sitting up there, gnawing at his wedge of goat’s cheese and “marvelling at the folly of it all”.

Nigel Richardson travelled with British Airways (0844 493 0758; ba.com/barcelona) which offers three nights at the five-star Hotel Arts from £439 per person b & b (until May 20), based on two people sharing, including return BA flight from Gatwick.

City sights and Orwell tours

Alan Warren offers three- to four-hour tours of the Barcelona of Homage to Catalonia and revolutionary Spain: for €25 (£21.50) for the first person, and €15pp (£12.85) thereafter, up to a maximum of eight people. Email him at Porta de la Historia: pdlhistoria@gmail.com.

The Museum of Catalonian History (en.mhcat.cat), by the old port, has a section on the civil war. Plaça de Pau Vila 3, open Tues 10am-7pm, Wed 10am-8pm, Thurs-Sat 10am-7pm, €4 (£3.40).

The inside track

If you’re planning on using much public transport, invest in a T-10 (pronounced “tay-dayoo”) pass, €8.25 (£7.10) for 10 journeys which can be shared between two or more people. Validate your ticket at either the Metro barrier or on the machine on board buses or trams.